The Politics of “The Time That Remains”

It’s impossible to review Elia Suleiman’s latest film, “The Time That Remains,” without reviewing the entire Middle East. Anthony Lane, who writes about the movie in the magazine this week, tries gamely to distinguish the movie’s restrained, precise, droll, and poignantly ironic direction from its politics, writing that Suleiman

makes smoke without fire—calm, acrid, almost noiseless films on a subject that is never less than inflammatory. His method finds order in the madness. Not that you will ever mistake the slant of his sympathies. It’s just that his vision of suffering is so scrupulous, and so mercifully free of histrionics, that it crosses the battle line of the argument.

The histrionics are there precisely in Suleiman’s understatement; the film’s polemical and rhetorical edge is, literally, the edge of the frame and the edge of the editing-table blade (or its digital equivalent). Suleiman’s sublime directorial precision is especially significant as a device of exclusion. What’s missing is the sense of the microphone at the dinner table, with all the casual excesses and freewheeling expression of passions that it implies. With delicate comedy, exquisite sensibility, and calm wit, Suleiman evokes anger, regret, and frustration; the cause of this bilious build-up is manifestly political, but he doesn’t express it in political terms. Suleiman himself, present in the film and playing himself, doesn’t speak; the faux naïveté of the silent observer hides politics in the apolitical, and avoids any whiff of the impolitic. Suleiman’s art would be deeper, stranger, and riskier if he were to dare to break his carefully conceived schema—if he were to dare to challenge not just his viewers’ sympathies but his own.

For example, here is what Dennis Lim, in his review in the Los Angeles Times of the new DVD release of the compilation “Germany in Autumn,” writes about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s segment of the film:

In his section, which bristles with the full force of his personality, Fassbinder plays himself—or perhaps a heightened version, a strung-out workaholic despairing over the political crisis, which is here intimately connected to his own inability to function.

Blocked, stressed, paranoid, he butts heads with his downtrodden lover, Armin Meier, who believes the terrorists should be executed, and with his mother, Lilo Pempeit, whom he engages in a back-and-forth over the principles of democracy and the value of free discussion; the film ends with him goading her into a jolting admission that she longs for a simpler, more authoritarian time.

“The Time That Remains”—a work of great beauty, subtlety, and complexity—nonetheless doesn’t bristle with the full force of Elia Suleiman’s personality.

The ace pilot leading Virgin Galactic’s billion-dollar quest to make commercial space travel a reality.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.